Planning Theory

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Urbanisms, worlding practices and the theory of planning

Ananya Roy
Planning Theory 2011 10: 6
DOI: 10.1177/1473095210386065

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Article

Planning Theory

Urbanisms, worlding practices 10(1) 6–15

© The Author(s) 2011

and the theory of planning

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DOI: 10.1177/1473095210386065
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Ananya Roy
University of California, Berkeley

Abstract
This special issue seeks to return the urban to the heart of planning theory. In doing so,
it has three objectives. Firstly, it highlights particular urbanisms: how they are produced,
lived and negotiated, from New York to Bogota. The articles thus draw attention to
the multiplicity of urbanisms that constitute the contemporary world system, thereby
disrupting the rather restricted analytics of global cities and world cities. Secondly,
the articles pay careful attention to the forms of worlding at work in such urbanisms,
demonstrating how the production of the urban takes place in the crucible of modernizing
projects of development, regimes of immigration and governance and experiments with
neoliberalism and market rule.Thirdly, this special issue seeks to explore the implications
of such research and analysis for the field of ideas currently constituted as planning
theory. How does the study of urbanisms allow a rigorous understanding of planning
as the organization and transformation of space? How can planning theory make sense
of seemingly unplanned spaces that lie outside the grid of visible order? In what ways is
planning itself a worlding practice, such that models, best practices, expertise and capital
circulate in transnational fashion, creating new worlds of planning common sense?

Keywords
development, globalization, space, politics, urban

The field of the theory of planning remains amorphous. It is marked by fluidity and het-
erogeneity. Although it is possible to identify dominant theories of planning and to
thereby trace paradigm shifts – from rational-comprehensive models to advocacy plan-
ning to the more recent interest in communicative practice, it is not possible to argue that
such dominant paradigms unite and define a community of inquiry. This may be the case
because planning derives its theory from the philosophies of various social theorists:

Corresponding author:
Ananya Roy, Department of City and Regional Planning, University of California, Berkeley, 228 Wurster Hall,
Berkeley, CA 94720-1850
Email: ananya@berkeley.edu

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Roy 7

from Habermas to Harvey, from Latour to Lacan. To apply such theories of the social
world to the particular project that is planning is a creative enterprise. But it also makes
for the lack of coherent theoretical form, such that it can be difficult even to reach agree-
ment on the very object of theory: planning. What is planning? The answers to this ques-
tion in planning theory are divided, contentious and at the very least multiple. Such
multiplicity, I believe, is the strength rather than weakness of planning theory. It is also
necessary because the project of planning itself is heterogeneous, even contradictory. On
the one hand, planning is the face of power and order, expressing the interests of eco-
nomic and political regimes. On the other hand, planning is social struggle and mobiliza-
tion for justice and opportunity. On the one hand, planning is the knowledge of anointed
experts, armed with microeconomic theories of land markets and toolkits of communica-
tive mediation. On the other hand, planning is rowdy debate and a remaking of the very
sphere of public discourse and its signs and symbols.
In this special issue of Planning Theory we seek to make a contribution to the theory
of planning by drawing attention to the making of cities, or what may be understood as
the ‘neglected sieve of space’ (Smith, 2003: ix). It is our intention to foreground urban-
ism in the theorization of planning. In doing so we argue that whatever else planning
theory may be concerned with, it must take up as serious study the production of urban
space. A focus on the urban problematic may not, and indeed should not, unite a com-
munity of inquiry and field of theory. But it is a necessary ingredient of how planning is
conceptualized and practiced. A planning theory that ignores the question of urbanism is
one that remains distant from the materiality of late capitalism and its political closures
and openings. It is a theory that fails to speak to the human condition of much of the
contemporary world. And it is a theory that runs the risk of remaining silent on the press-
ing question of the social constitution of planning, of how planning as an urbanistic
practice is implicated in the struggles of the capitalist city.

Urbanisms in the world order

The concept of urbanism has been the central canon of much of the urban theory pro-
duced in the 20th century. In his definitive 1938 article Louis Wirth presented urbanism
as an ecological order characterized by size, density and heterogeneity. For the Chicago
School of urban sociology this ecology in turn produced distinctive forms of social
behavior and patterns, including those of alienation and anonymity. But urbanism as
ecology was a limited concept, an urban ideology, as Castells (1972) was to argue, that
obfuscated the capitalist political economy that produced urban space. Such Marxist
critiques contained echoes of a more complex argument about urbanism presented by
Georg Simmel in his 1903 [1971] article, ‘Metropolis and Mental Life’ Predating Wirth,
Simmel’s analysis was concerned with a metropolitan way of life and its time-space
disjunctures but ultimately situated metropolitanism in a money economy. It is this ter-
ritorialization of capital that was absent in the ecological abstractions of Chicago School
urbanism. But it was to become prominent in the analysis of French philosopher, Henri
Lefebvre.
In a series of publications Lefebvre makes the case that late capitalism is marked by
an urban revolution. It is important to note that for Lefebvre the urban condition is not

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8 Planning Theory 10(1)

coincident with the venue of the city. Instead, Lefebvre uses the term urban to signal the
processes through which the production of space becomes the prime engine of economy
and society. Yet, in Lefebvre’s work urbanism is not overdetermined by capital accumu-
lation. Urbanism is an assemblage of meanings and signs, of spatial memories and lived
experiences. It is the politics of space and the spatialization of politics. Space, for
Lefebvre, is radically open (Smith, 2003).
Ultimately, Lefebvre is interested in what may be understood to be the epistemology
of the urban: what are the theoretical practices through which we understand the urban?
What is the discipline of urbanism? Do such practices engender a new politics of space?
As Smith (2003: xii) notes, this was the task of Lefebvre’s early contribution, The Urban
Revolution. It was meant to intervene in a field of knowledge production that was domi-
nated by primarily descriptive sketches of the urban, those that Lefebvre saw as ideologi-
cal blind fields, obscuring constitutive socio-spatial relations. Indeed, in the introduction
to The Production of Space, Lefebvre (1974:7) makes a distinction between ‘inventories
of what exists in space’, even ‘discourse on space’ and what he terms ‘knowledge of
space’ (emphases in original).
In this special issue we use the term urbanism to mean four interrelated processes.
Firstly, urbanism refers to the territorial circuits of late capitalism. Following Lefebvre,
we are interested not merely in objects in space but rather in the very production of
space. This urban transformation is evident in the heartland of global cities like New
York and Santiago as well as in the frontiers of capitalist and imperialist expansion such
as Kabul. To understand the urban character of capitalism it is necessary to pay attention
to how the city, as a platform of market rule and state practice, is implicated in various
projects of neoliberalism, developmentalism, modernization and postcolonialism. To
state that the production of space is a capitalist enterprise, then, is not sufficient, for capi-
tal accumulation co-exists, often in contradictory fashion, with other projects of space
and power. It is thus necessary to pay attention to the particular conjunctures through
which capitalism is consolidated and challenged. Such conjunctures have territorial man-
ifestations: Kabul’s global village that houses an apparatus of transnational aid and
development; the designed, watched over public spaces of Bogota that seek to produce
model citizens; the uneasy alliance of neoliberal calculation and developmentalist ambi-
tion in the infrastructure projects of Santiago; the highly differentiated hierarchy of regu-
lation and rights in claims to space on the sidewalks of New York City.
Secondly, urbanism indicates a set of social struggles over urban space. Lefebvre’s
normative intervention of the right to the city – an assertion of use value over exchange
value – is perhaps too demanding a concept for an analysis of these variegated struggles.
The unceasing and minute tactics that both govern and negotiate the habitation of space –
on the sidewalks of New York, in the public spaces of Bogota, at the margins of highway
projects in Santiago – do not necessarily fit the prescription of revolutionary spatial prac-
tice. But they constitute a field of contradictions and antagonisms that can be understood
as what Merrifield (2002: 17) has called ‘dialectical urbanism’, ‘an urbanism of ambigu-
ity and contradiction and conflict’. Merrifield (2002: 9) rightly notes that ‘urbanism’ is a
‘political experience’, ‘political as it pertains to … issues of power and conflict’.
Thirdly, urbanism is a formally constituted object, one produced through the public
apparatus that we may designate as planning. It is thus that in Bogota violence and

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Roy 9

inequality are transformed into ‘pedagogical urbanism’, a planned social order. This face
of urbanism is that which Lefebvre (1974) critically examines as ‘representations of
space’ – the signs and symbols deployed by experts as they seek to control and order
space. Indeed, Lefebvre (1974: 11) makes the case for the ‘active – the operational or
instrumental – role of space, as knowledge and action’ in the perpetuation of hegemony.
It is in this sense that urbanism is pedagogical, as is the case of the model city, Bogota.
As argued by Rachel Berney in this issue, here urbanism is an object constituted through
planning and is thus implicated in the efforts to constitute model citizens and institute
civic norms.
Fourthly, urbanism is inevitably global. The global dimension can be understood in
different ways. For example, it signifies what Brenner (2000: 362) designates as ‘a scale
question’; how the restructuring of space repositions the urban scale as an important site
of capital accumulation and governance. The global nature of urbanism can also be under-
stood in the broad sense of the uneven geographies of late capitalism. Lefebvre (1974:
412) himself argues that space has to be understood on a ‘world scale’. In this issue of
Planning Theory, we refer to a specific globality: the urbanism of the global South.
Much of the urban growth of the 21st century will take place in the cities of the global
South. In previous work I have argued that the production of theory must take account of
these new geographies (Roy, 2009). This special issue makes visible some of these geog-
raphies: Bogota, Kabul, Santiago. But as a concept the global South must mean more
than a collection of scattered sites that lie beyond the demarcated boundaries of
EuroAmerica. The global South also indicates an unmapped space that is integrated into
dominant forms of knowledge as the ‘other’, that which does not fully conform to known
templates of urbanism. Often imagined as unruly megacities, the urban formations of the
global South can thus be described, diagnosed, even reformed and fixed, but rarely do
they become the evidentiary material for theory, for a universal system of generaliza-
tions. The articles in this issue stage an intervention in these spaces of knowledge and
seek to outline a theory that is produced in the crucible of the cities of the global South.
It thereby includes an analysis of urban sites that may in a philosophical sense, to borrow
a term from Gregory (2002: 2) be considered ‘unthinkable space’. What more poignant
example of unthinkable space can there be than Kabul? Seemingly unplanned, seemingly
undecipherable, marked by unimaginable fragmentation and extraordinary violence, is
this urbanism? Or is this only dystopia? Yet, by locating the question of cosmopolitanism
and thus globality, in Kabul, Calogero argues in his article in this volume that such types
of unthinkable space may speak to some of the most prevalent urban and thus human
conditions of the 21st century.
In order to generate a theory of planning that is attentive to the urbanism of the global
South, the articles in this special issue rely on the concept of worlding. This concept
serves as a counterpoint to the framework of global/world cities that has become com-
monplace in urban theory. Global or world cities, defined as command and control nodes
of the global economy are, as Jennifer Robinson argues (2002), a regulating fiction. New
York, London, Tokyo: they are seen to embody a successful formula of urban entrepre-
neurialism, that which guarantees a place on the global map of investment, development
and economic growth. More recent mappings of world cities include some in the global
South like Singapore, Shanghai and Sao Paulo. But, as Robinson has noted, in this

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10 Planning Theory 10(1)

framework much of the urban life of the world remains off the map, deemed structurally
irrelevant to the commanding heights of the global economy. In contrast, the concept of
worlding seeks to recover and restore the vast array of global strategies that are being
staged at the urban scale around the world. In some cases these urban experiments are
closely tied to elite aspirations and the making of world-class cities; in other cases, they
are instances of worlding from below (Simone, 2001) as laboring bodies circulate in
search of survival, livelihood and hope.
While such practices can be read in the register of urbanism, it is important to make
note of their worlding character. The articles in this issue are especially concerned with
a particular type of worlding practice: inter-referencing, a term I carry over from my
ongoing work with Aihwa Ong (Roy and Ong, 2011) and that reveals how the production
of urban space takes place through reference to models of urbanism. Thus, Giuliani’s
policed New York or a revitalized post-industrial London are much circulated global
referents of urbanism. But increasingly, forms of worlding cannot be understood merely
as a globalization imposed by the West on the Rest. Instead, in the global South they are
often examples of a homegrown neoliberalization, one produced to consolidate postco-
lonial sovereignty and territory. New practices of inter-referencing involve South–South
coordinates and emergent South-based global referents. It is thus that Bogota’s public
urbanism has emerged as a important urban model that circulates widely. In India, urban
planners and city elites turn to Asian models of urbanism such as Shanghai and Singapore
for reference and inspiration. Such forms of inter-referencing make possible the transfor-
mation of urban disorder, the dystopia of the global South, into civic order and postcolo-
nial pride.
Referenced urbanism is often brutal and violent. In India the ‘Shanghaification of
Mumbai’ has displaced thousands of slum dwellers and squatters and the national effort
to create Chinese-style special economic zones has set into motion widespread dispos-
session and state-led land grabs. Such references circulate not only through the state-
formulated plans but also through the urban aspirations of middle-class associations and
elite NGOs all seeking to create the good city. Of course, there is no place for the urban
poor in such a good city. This is the production of an Asian urban capitalism that self-
consciously presents itself as Asia, that deploys the motifs of the Asian century and that
references other Asian models. In their crudest form, these worlding practices legitimize
national projects of primitive accumulation, often deepening socio-spatial inequality and
injustice.
But the circulation of models of urbanism can also be a more complex process. In his
article on street vendors in New York, Ryan Devlin makes note of how a more progres-
sive referencing is possible, as New York’s largest vendor organization, the Street Vendor
Project, seeks to forge collaborations with those in the global South and to thus adopt a
more radical approach to the question of space. Models themselves are constellations of
dense meaning. For example, the Singapore model that has circulated throughout Asia –
often actively exported by the city-state of Singapore itself – is that of urban develop-
mentalism, civic order and green aesthetics. However, there are other aspects of the
Singapore model – its extensive public housing program – that rarely circulate. Ironically,
one of the world’s most comprehensive welfare states circulates as a model of free market
rule. Yet, this disjuncture itself is a political opening, one that makes possible debate

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Roy 11

about what precisely constitutes a Singaporean, or Asian, model of urbanism and of the
role of the state in producing and regulating such a model. Similarly, in India, as power-
ful peasant uprisings have recently called into question the land grabs associated with
Chinese style special economic zones, so the Indian state has sought to interpret the
Chinese model in a new way: as an authoritarian planning system that cannot be imple-
mented in the world’s largest democracy. In India, this rejection of the Chinese model
has set into motion a new national debate about the key instruments of planning: eminent
domain, zoning and the public interest.

Lessons for a theory of planning

What does an analysis of urbanisms and their worlding character contribute to a (hetero-
geneous) theory of planning? The articles in this issue suggest three contributions.
Firstly, they show that planning is itself a worlding practice. It is through the project of
planning that urban models, development best practices, technocratic expertise and mul-
tiple types of capital circulate in transnational fashion. This circulation is not new. The
colonial cities of the 19th century were also instances of planning’s worlding practices,
as French and British planners undertook the creation and reform of North African or
South Asian cities, often referencing European models. In bolder versions of colonial
planning the colony was the site of urban experiments, with these experimental ideas
then circulating back to Europe for implementation in cities such as Paris and London.
This special issue highlights some unusual aspects of worlding. Although New York,
especially revanchist New York, remains a much-referenced global model of neoliberal
urbanism, Devlin’s article shows how New York immigrants may themselves reference
various forms of Southern urbanism, legitimizing their street vending both in the lan-
guage of American bootstrap entrepreneurship and Southern claims to space. Or, the
circulation of the Bogota model, in other words the globalization of its urban pedagogy,
demonstrates a South–South referencing of urban models. Such forms of referencing
consolidate rather than erode power and hierarchy. It is thus in the name of model citi-
zenship that Bogota’s political regime is able to govern space. These models in circula-
tion necessitate the urgent question posed by Goonewardena (2005: 55):

What is the role played by the aesthetics and politics of space – i.e. ‘the urban sensorium’ … in
producing and reproducing the durable disjunction between the consciousness of our urban
‘everyday life’ … and the now global structure of social relations that is itself ultimately
responsible for producing the spaces of our lived-experience?

As planning practice is increasingly implicated in these types of worlding practices,

so planning theory must pay critical attention to the ethical claims that accompany mod-
els of urbanism. Calogero presents us with a provocation – an ethics of agonistic cosmo-
politanism. Such an ethics is quite different from the socio-spatial order that is usually
pursued in cities through instruments of planning. What will it take to value such an ethi-
cal perspective?
Secondly, the worlding practices of planning are closely linked to another form of
worlding: the flows of capital. The production of space, while unfolding at the urban

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12 Planning Theory 10(1)

scale, is a global process. Smith (2002) rightly argues that this is simultaneously globalism
and urbanism, a ‘gentrification as global urban strategy’ that has made urban real-estate
development a ‘pivotal sector in the new urban economies’. It is in this sense that
Lefebvre designated space not as the medium or arena of late capitalism but rather as its
means of production, as the very stake of its politics. A theory of planning must take up
the study of this new type of production capital: the production of space. But the produc-
tion of space is entangled with other flows of capital, most of which get little attention in
planning debates. There is the development capital that is disbursed by international
finance institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Asian,
African and Inter-American Development Banks that finance infrastructure projects.
Development capital not only produces urban space but also brings with it conditions
and reforms. These can range from the liberalization of economies to the implementation
of environmental and social impact assessments. In other words, development capital is
an agent of planning.
Also entangled with the production of urban space is finance capital. This was made
starkly evident during the recent financial speculation and its subsequent crisis, one that
triggered a meltdown in US subprime housing markets. A similar crisis of financial and
real-estate speculation brought frontier cities like Dubai and Las Vegas to a halt. Dubai,
building the world’s tallest building as the anchor of what can only be understood as
hyper-urbanism, is $100 billion in debt. It continues only through numerous bail-outs by
another city-state: Abu Dhabi, rich in oil and boasting one of the world’s largest sover-
eign wealth funds. These forms of petro-urbanism not only exist elsewhere but are also
found at ‘home’ in the west. After all, the cities of North America and western Europe are
instances of what Mitchell (2009) has called carbon democracy, systems of production
and consumption dependent on petroleum. In the USA, just as the financial crisis has not
shaken the edifices of high finance and its predations, so the country’s largest oil spill has
not shaken the hunger for fossil fuels. If we are to better understand the production of
space, then we also have to take account of multiple formations of capitalism, from
development capitalism to petro-capitalism to finance capitalism.
Thirdly, this special issue raises a simple but urgent question: who plans? Following
Huxley and Yiftachel (2000) it can be argued that the role of the state is central in the
project of planning. Huxley and Yiftachel (2000: 338) thus argue that planning is the
‘public production of space’. It is worth noting that Yiftachel (2006) consistently draws
attention to not just the role of the state but rather the role of the nation-state. He is thus
concerned with the agenda of ethnocratic nationalism and how this is expressed in dis-
courses and practices of planning. State spaces, to borrow a term from Brenner (2004),
loom large in this special issue as well. The role of the state in regulating and deregulat-
ing space is prominent, be it in the infrastructure franchises of Santiago or in the legal
intricacy of New York’s spatial controls. It is the state that produces what may be under-
stood as citizen spaces in cities like Bogota – planned spaces where model citizens can
be nurtured and governed.
But the articles in this special issue also call into question the public character of plan-
ning. Huxley and Yiftachel insert the term public into the Lefebvrian phrase, production
of space. But is this necessarily the state? In the urban contexts analyzed in this special
issue, private interests, regimes and associations often undertake the project of planning.

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Roy 13

Such processes cannot be understood only as the privatization of planning, for such
forms of planning are often initiated and implemented on behalf of the public interest, in
alliance with the state and in defense of the urban commons. From the American military
in Kabul to the business improvement districts of New York, the task of urban governance
exceeds and overflows the formal limits of the state. My own research in sites like
Bangladesh and Lebanon demonstrates how much of the apparatus of service delivery –
what we may quite precisely call planning – is managed by private forces, be it the feared
militia, Hezbollah or the revered pro-poor non-governmental organizations, BRAC and
Grameen Bank (Roy, 2010). If the public in Yiftachel’s public production of space does
not hold, then is planning an unbounded, rather than a state-bound, practice? Is planning
then synonymous with the production of space, unmarked by any special designation of
public interest or the agency of the state? This issue suggests that such is the case. But
this is a controversial claim and we thus invite planning theorists to take up the challenge
of discussing and debating this point.

Locations
Theory is produced in specific sites. This materiality matters. Ideas in circulation like
planning models in circulation emerge from the struggles and dilemmas of particular
locations. Too often theory and theorists tend to obscure the parochial geographies within
which they are located and from within which they speak. In closing, I must therefore
acknowledge two locations from within which I write this brief introduction to this spe-
cial issue on urbanisms and worlding. The first is Shenzhen, China’s first special eco-
nomic zone, a carefully planned and regulated space. Shenzhen, with its rows of industrial
parks populated by eager rural migrant workers, has long epitomized the global assembly
line. In Shenzhen the dream that eludes many other cities – industrial jobs – is real. But
Shenzhen is also a carefully guarded enclave, the open economy city to which entrance
for most Chinese workers is impossible and where the life of the migrant, the floating
body rendered illegal by China’s governance of space, is impossibly difficult. In a no-
place hotel at the intersection of multi-laned high-speed boulevards lined by glass tow-
ers, I attended a conference on the making of global cities and the world economic crisis.
In Shenzhen’s financial district landscape there does not seem to be a crisis; only endless
speculation on an urbanism whose towers and highways stretch to the horizon. This is the
Asian urbanism to which my native country, India and its planners, aspire. It is the world-
ing model that may just dominate the urban century that lies ahead. Shenzhen returns me
to Simmel, for here all urban life seems to float in a common denominator. This is no
longer money, no longer space, but rather something yet more abstract than both, time:
time compressed and condensed as development. Time speeded up such that planners of
the massive Pearl River Delta region, perhaps the world’s largest urban agglomeration,
boldly state that cities like Hong Kong must high speed themselves or risk being left
behind by success stories like Shenzhen.
Space, Lefebvre argued, is now the stake of politics. I am used to studying struggles
over space in cities around the world. But in recent times this struggle has unfolded in the
most intimate of spaces, that of the university. Neoliberalism has caught up with the
public university, the University of California, Berkeley, at which I teach. The financial

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14 Planning Theory 10(1)

crisis of America’s bankrupt state, California, has also become a crisis of the public char-
acter of higher education, a crisis of the social contract that once promised opportunity.
The mobilizations to save public education are also struggles over space. They have
played out in the hallowed spaces of Berkeley on the Mario Savio steps of Sproul Plaza,
taking up the fading inheritance of the Free Speech movement and the 1960s. The radical
edge of the student movement has sought to territorialize this struggle by occupying
buildings, often referencing and live-streaming of videos of student occupations in
Europe. This is their global scale, a counter-worlding of sorts. In November 2009 a failed
attempt at occupying Berkeley’s Capital Projects building (since students have been par-
ticularly furious at the use of their tuition to securitize the university’s construction
bonds) led them to academic buildings and then to arrests and the county jail. A new
journal, launched by graduate students at UC Berkeley, is thus titled Reclamations – an
effort to ‘emancipate the commons’ in the face of ‘aggressive expropriations of the pub-
lic domain’ (Reclamations, n.d.). Reclaiming the commons, the editors note in the intro-
duction to the first issue, requires not only claiming space but also claiming time, a
laying claim to the future. The latter, this orientation to the future, is how we often envi-
sion planning. But it is also the claim of student insurgencies such as that unfolding at
Berkeley, those that face off lines of riot police and refuse to give consent to a future of
bonded indebtedness. A theory of planning is ultimately about such vectors of space and
time. Such formations are not externally constituted objects of study waiting to be docu-
mented and described. Instead, borrowing one more time from Lefebvre, planning itself
must be understood as both an everyday and interplanetary practice – of discipline and
profession – that is constituted through struggles over space and time.

Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Jean Hillier for her intrepid leadership of Planning Theory and for her encour-
agement and support of this special issue.

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Author Biography
Ananya Roy is Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of California,
Berkeley, where she co-directs the Global Metropolitan Studies Center and holds the
Friesen Chair in Urban Studies. Roy’s research is concerned with themes of social
inequality, urban informality, and postcolonial capitalism. Her most recent book is titled
Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development (Routledge, 2010).

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